Cuomo: It’s Not Like The Legislature Needs To Follow Messages

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, in Potsdam today to give a version of his budget presentation, defended the use of messages of necessity, saying that the ball is really in the court of the Legislature when it comes to waiving the three-day aging process.

Cuomo was not asked about the comments made by Republican Assemblyman Steve McLaughlin, who compared the governor’s usage of the messages to Hitler and Mussolini, because the Q and A and that Albany news conference happened around the same time.

Republicans have knocked Cuomo for his aggressive push to pass his sweeping gun control legisaltion in the last month, with the measure being approved by both houses of the Legislature a day after it was printed.

But he defended the use of the messages, saying that technically it is up to lawmakers to ask for messages of necessity themselves.

“Their proposal I think is a little backwards. The Legislature doesn’t have to vote for the bill when the governor issues a message of necessity,” Cuomo said during the question-and-answer session. “They can. So it’s really up to the Legislature in the first place. If they don’t want to vote on a bill, don’t vote. That’s the very simple solution. You don’t need a Constitutional reformation act.”

Cuomo has deployed this defense before, but he’s also noted that he’s issued fewer messages than his predecessors, and that when it came to gun control, the law needed to be passed quickly in order to prevent runs on gun stores.

Still, the governor has shown the ability to influence the Legislature to pass major pieces of legislation very quickly in order to achieve legislative victories in a city that he says shouldn’t be a “debating society.”